Using SEO and keywords to research your ideas

Using SEO and keywords to research your ideas

We increasingly get asked how we go about researching the viability of new ideas and projects, not to mention that all important competitor research!

Anyway, I decided to put together this small guide to show you how we go about it and to give you a few ideas that you can use. Not only that but using one example I’ll show you how you can morph an idea that looked not too promising on first glance into one which is by using this process.

I wanted to do this simply because we get so many clients that come to us wanting us to perform their SEO or run Facebook ads for them on their GREAT idea, that I might add they have FULLY DEVELOPED with all the bells and whistles, and when we look there is hardly any market online at all in terms of raw search volumes.

NOT GOOD!

As no search normally means no money.

Now don’t get me wrong here. You Can still make a product work if there are no searches for it but it is hard to do as you have to go the social route and create demand from scratch, and then try and get it to go viral. It takes a ton of work and no small amount of knowledge and money.

So then, how exactly should you perform your research If you’re doing things the right way around and doing this right after that light bulb goes off in your head with your new idea?

So I’m going to do this as though I’ve just had an idea. I’ve jotted down a few notes so I don’t forget it and now I want to see if there is a market for it BEFORE I waste one penny on web design, logos, domain names or any of that exciting stuff.

Let’s assume then that I’ve just come up with the idea to make an amazing desktop planner that is unlike any planner you have ever seen. It has all the bells and whistles. I’m excited to get started and am already thinking of how many I’m going to sell. People are just going to love my planner simply because I do and they are going to fly off my site so fast I won’t be able to keep up with demand.

All of my dreams are like that. I wish reality was!

At this point I stop and reset my Pomodoro for my break mode, make a coffee and open up my Note Pad++

In Note Pad ++ I start to brainstorm keyword and keyword phrase ideas. I normally aim for about 10 if I can. So for my Desktop Planner idea it will look something like this

desktop planner

weekly planner

year planner

monthly planner

diary planner

organiser

time planner

task list

to do list

Just so you’re not confused.

This is a keyword:

Planner

This is a keyword phrase:

Desktop Planner

This is what we call Low hanging fruit:

I want to buy a Desktop Planner and I have my wallet out on the table and my credit card in hand

Of course, the person that typed in the low hanging fruit search is much more likely to buy your planner than the guy that just types in “planner”

Once I’m happy with my seed list of keyword and keyword phrase ideas I will head over to SEM Rush which I use for pretty much all my keyword research amongst other things. I also cross reference ideas with AHREFS. Both of these tools are excellent in their own way for research.

I pretty much use these two sites exclusively for SEO and project research tasks with some Screaming Frog thrown in for good measure. I like them both for various reasons and both are reasonably accurate.

Let’s head on over to SEM Rush then and create an account. You can create a free account for 7 days that gives you some limited functionality but then you must upgrade to a paid plan. Currently the lite plan (pro) is $99 per month and is enough to do what you want to do.

Once you have signed up with them and have your account login and go to Keywords Analytics on the left-hand menu as seen here.

It looks like this…

Now enter into the box provided one of your seed keywords from your Note Pad so that it looks like this. I’ve started with my main one “Desktop Planner”

Click search and this is what you will see next. Next I will click View full report as I have shown in the arrow.

Now we will see the search volumes.

This is terrible! As you can see I have sorted the volume column and there are only 140 people per month that search for the phrase “Desktop Planner” NOT GOOD.

I added a few of the better ones to Keyword Analyser by selecting the little icon next to each keyword so i can start building a main list of keywords that I like the look of.

and this is what it looks like when you go to the Keyword Analyser screen

Total volumes of around 370 searches per month. Now with a product as low in price as a Desktop planner this is not good volume for a serious business.

At this point I would probably do a little bit more playing around with some of the other keywords and right it off as not worth the effort to develop the idea and further.

However!

What if I lose the idea that my new product is a “Desktop Planner” and instead call it a “Weekly Planner” Or even a “Yearly Planner” Now let’s see what happens to my research!

8100 searches excellent. Let’s add in “Yearly” and also “to do list” and see where we end up.

Now we are talking.

OK let me add all those ideas to keyword magic and see what we end up with. So I added some of these ideas to keyword Analyser and this is what it now looks like

Let’s export it to excel and check the volumes now!

136,630 Monthly searches for those related keyword phrases. Now we are talking! With this volume and a £20 quid product you can make a LOT of money if you know what you’re doing with SEO! How would that work out roughly though?

If you managed to get Page 1 Position 1 for all of them you would get around 20.5% of the clicks. The clever people over at IgniteVisibility produced this nice graph here to show how your page one to ten click through rate looks like roughly.

So roughly 28,009 people would click through to your site based on our initial keyword list of 136,630.

If you’re site is setup well and you have a nice UX experience with a slick cart you could expect your cart to convert at about 2 to 3% which would equal 840 orders for your £20 product. Some carts convert at more and some at less. This is dependent on many factors.

So 840 x £20 = £16,800 in monthly sales. Actually I need to go back and check this as that’s not bad at all is it!

Now of course you might have an amazing site and your cart might convert at more than 3% but you get the idea here. There is a market and this is something I would look to develop into an idea. At this point I would register the domain, get a logo and do all that other exciting stuff.

If I really played around with this I could find lots more related keywords that would fit nicely onto this list and build volume out even more but you get the idea.

To be honest If I didn’t have so much client work to do I could spend hours and hours researching ideas LOL. I love it and really get into when I get going. If only I had more hours in the day! Anyway, I hope this has given you some insight into how you can research your own ideas to see if they are viable.